I renounced the life of my own class, for I had come to confess that it was not a real life, only the semblance of one, that its superfluous luxury prevented the possibility of understanding life, and that in order to do so I must know, not an exceptional parasitic life, but the simple life of the working-classes, the life which fashions that of the world, and gives it the meaning which the working-classes accept.

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, loc. 181